


Hop Aboard the Turntable

by theoldgods



Category: Rocketman (2019)
Genre: Alcohol, Arguing, Canon-Level Implied Abuse, Canon-Level Implied Infidelity, Christmas, Drug Use, Established Relationship, Floor Sex, Gift Giving, Intoxicated Sex, Jewelry, M/M, Make the Yuletide Gay, Unhealthy Relationships, Yuletide, Yuletide 2019, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:34:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21623047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoldgods/pseuds/theoldgods
Summary: One pop star, one manager-lover, one early 1970s Christmas Day: a thousand ways Elton and John are heavenly together, a thousand and one ways their relationship is hell.
Relationships: Elton John & Bernie Taupin, Elton John/John Reid
Comments: 12
Kudos: 49
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Hop Aboard the Turntable

**Author's Note:**

  * For [novelized](https://archiveofourown.org/users/novelized/gifts).



> Written as a Yuletide treat for novelized for Yuletide 2019, as thanks for your great Rocketman and Rocketman RPF fic this year and because the idea of an Elton/Reid Christmas, in all its bittersweet 1970s fucked-upness, wouldn't leave me. Happy Yuletide!
> 
> Title is from ["Step into Christmas,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbRtGMm96F8) because I couldn't resist. Set at some point after "Honky Cat" and the coming out to Sheila but before the pool, where things are not going particularly well but denial (and alcohol/drug use) is strong.
> 
> This is based on the film and has film-canon levels of implied unhealthiness/abuse/etc.; it isn't intended to say anything about the real-life people or relationships involved.

Everything is blurry as Elton comes to awareness, a film of unsettling dreams lingering on his tongue. The back of his throat aches, as does his head.

“Darling.”

John’s voice, somewhere close to his ear, and a gentle pressure against Elton’s cheek that is probably John’s fingers, though it could be his nose or his cock or any other damned part of him, for all Elton knows. Elton’s guts twist, wonder and dread twined around one another, and he buries his face into his pillow.

“No.”

Chuckling, and Elton’s left eye throbs behind his closed lids, but the sound is warm; the sourness leaking through his body seems to be all from the hangover instead of John. A broad palm works its way down Elton’s side, warm and soft, pausing at the top of Elton’s arse. 

“Beautiful as ever, but I have something even better.”

Elton grunts, licking dry lips. “Headache tonight, dear.”

Genuine laughter, bright and yet earnest, the kind of tone that can still make Elton, dazed or not, smile against the sheets.

“Even better than my arse, if you can believe it.”

Elton’s arms and thighs ache, from the piano, from John’s insatiable need of late, though the past several days are little more than one long gig in his head, shimmering tinsel he’d wrapped around Bernie’s throat in a dressing room and fake snow he’d begged John to arrange—

He rolls over and reaches for John, hand twitching against bare skin as his heart leaps and he attempts to sit up.

“Christmas?”

John, his edges pleasantly smudged without Elton’s glasses, is all softness, dark hair mussed, eyes wide and warm, mouth partly open as he massages one of Elton’s thighs. He kisses Elton, whose stomach flips, a step missed going down stairs, closing his eyes to luxuriate in the hint of minty toothpaste lingering on John's breath. One of John’s hands transfers to Elton’s ear, thumbing the empty piercing.

“Remember those pearls I talked you down from?”

Elton’s denied himself nothing for several years now, and the effect of that is, of course, long periods of happy blackouts. He absolutely remembers buying pearls, on multiple occasions, though not rowing with John about it. 

“Keep your eyes closed.”

Elton ignores the throbbing of his temples while John roots through something on the bedside table. He leans into John’s touch as John threads cool metal into the hole in his earlobe and kisses him, a ghost of lip on lip, sliding something nearly as cool around Elton’s wrist.

“Your strop was about the earbob, but I knew you deserved the lot.” When Elton doesn’t move, John clears his throat. “Open your eyes.”

It’s the backstage voice, the “do this, now, there’s an audience” voice, cajoling and supporting Elton, hectoring delinquent roadies, all in the fewest possible words, and Elton smiles as he obeys.

John’s watching him, smiling, a long loop of black pearls dangling from one hand. As Elton looks down at the matching bracelet around his wrist, John drapes the necklace around Elton in one long, smooth motion, running his fingers through the hair at the base of Elton’s scalp until Elton shivers.

“Fuck, John.”

John kisses him firmly, thumb sliding into the corner of Elton’s mouth.

“Is that a good ‘fuck’?”

“Must have been, to earn me these.” Pearls weigh more than he remembers, pressing in on wrist and neck and ear as John laughs. “Which one did the trick?”

John rolls him back into the mattress, burying them both beneath the duvet, one hand trailing between their naked bodies. Elton is barely hard; John works him slowly, skillfully, whispering little nothings for the long minutes it takes Elton’s cock and brain to release.

“So decadent, tossing off some half-asleep old queen draped in jewelry,” John murmurs as Elton, panting softly, grins and pulls John’s hand against his heart.

“Oh, hush,” Elton says, draping the free end of the necklace around John’s wrist. “There’s some sparkly for you under the tree, and I think your Jag is finally coming just after the new year.” Elton’s heart flutters as John, giggling, buries his face against Elton’s neck. “Happy fucking Christmas, darling.”

They stumble through the rest of the morning in an unusually quiet state, wrapped around one another on a sofa in front of the tree while the housekeeper and her staff run around putting finishing touches to the party plans. Elton chases away his headache with hot toddies, and John, in cashmere and slacks, his new gold bracelet shimmering, is pure dozy happiness, pressing unshaven kisses to Elton’s throat while Elton massages John’s delicately bare feet. The good mood lasts into the afternoon, through several rounds of his mother’s snarking before they finally sit down to dinner, assisted by the bottles of French red that John orders up from the wine cellar. Sheila waits until after the crackers to pronounce upon the new jewelry.

“Black, though, Reggie?” she asks, waving Derf off as he reaches for her slipping paper crown. “I mean, _obviously_ it’s the best, but it won’t go with half as much—”

“I already have at least ten strings of good old white, Mum.” Elton sets his fork down, grinding his teeth, before adding, almost as if it were an afterthought, “I think John wanted to surprise me this time.”

Sheila’s face brightens almost instantaneously; her smile is as lopsided as her crown as she takes a long drink, and Elton can feel the uptick in his blood pressure. “Well,” she says finally, ducking her head to avoid John’s sweetly innocent grin, “I suppose it _is_ very glamorous, John, really, you know I can’t fault your taste. It won’t look too strange against his hair?”

John, stifling a laugh, sets down his silverware to straighten Sheila’s crown; she leans against him, loose and fond, as his hands linger in her curls. “Oh, there’s hardly anything there, any neutral shade will be fine.” He winks at Elton while Sheila titters, though his face is waxen, his hair slicked and strictly parted, Manager John handling an issue with the staff.

Elton drains his glass.

They’re on to champagne by the time evening sets in and the house fills with guests in various states of Christmas intoxication. Elton’s pearls draw no further comment, though Bernie, stinking of brandy, strokes the bracelet as he wraps Elton in a hug.

“All right?”

Elton presses his forehead to Bernie’s, though he does not meet his gaze.

“Should it not be?” Coy, though it comes out scratchy and limp, alarmingly serious. Elton kisses Bernie’s cheeks, twice on each side, loud smacking busses, leaning into the Continental grandeur of his jewelry. “John managed her.”

Bernie, in flat shoes to Elton’s spangled platforms, stands on tiptoes to rest his chin against Elton’s hair for a moment before pulling away.

The party is a long blur of toasts and barely disguised drinking games, Elton winding his way around the manor to be feted by group after group, and as the night goes on Elton manages to fall down a pleasant, bubbly hole. It’s not a particularly large bash—just family, the band and John’s management team and their assorted significant and insignificant others, fewer than fifty people with nowhere better to be on Christmas night—and by the time the powder appears, everyone over the age of thirty, already in short supply, has long disappeared to more respectable places. Elton, in a glittery purple and silver Father Christmas hat stolen from one of John’s prettier secretaries, amuses himself for a while by taking on all comers in rounds of lines, who can snort the quickest, erupting into shrieks when Bernie, shirt unbuttoned, smelling of today’s girl’s perfume, finally bests him.

“You twat!” Elton swats Bernie’s arm as he dances away, laughing. “Two out of three.”

“Hell no,” Bernie drawls, faintly slurred, rubbing a very red nostril. “Nutter.”

“Ping-pong, then.” Elton’s hands are moving as quickly as his brain, wrapping themselves around Bernie’s shoulders, dragging him toward the games room. 

“Just take the loss,” Bernie says, giggling, his body so _warm_ in Elton’s grip as he stumbles in Elton’s wake. Elton’s veins are humming on full power by now, his lips as numb and tingly as the back of his throat. “Or snooker.”

Elton is far better at ping-pong than snooker, a fact Bernie knows extremely well, and there’s absolutely no reason he should cede ground in his own fucking house. He shoves Bernie, a hard elbow to Bernie’s ribs while Bernie laughs, and pushes him across the threshold. The snooker table is occupied, a realization that makes Elton smile until he clocks that one of the players is John, playfully angling his cue at the arse of his now-hatless secretary.

Elton almost stumbles before drawing himself up, tossing said hat onto the ground, and striding forward, chest protruding, his campest inflection on tap.

“Reidy baby.”

John turns to him slowly, blinking as though emerging from some cave into the outside world while Elton approaches. The secretary, cheeks flushed red, smiles.

“Next frame, Elton?”

Elton ignores him, grabbing John’s arm. John’s muscles tighten beneath his grip, though John’s face remains beatific, if slightly dazed.

“She’s a happy one,” John murmurs, low enough so that neither his boy nor Bernie can hear, rubbing his thumb down Elton’s elbow. Elton’s skin is crackling in too many places to fully register the touch. “Having a good night?”

It’s really only half solicitous, only half needling and prodding and _managing_ ; most of John’s voice is genuinely happy, and all of it is easily innocent, without any pretense. His ease only makes Elton’s sense of _un_ ease flare up higher in his throat, choking his words.

“How long’ve you been here?”

Half-slurred, out of nowhere; Elton knows he shouldn’t be this high, but his voice has other plans, apparently, and he cringes as John smiles.

“Maybe twenty minutes?” He massages Elton’s back, and Elton fights the urge to step away. It had all been going so smoothly. “Did we miss something?”

Elton bites his tongue, little though it does with half his face numb. “'We'?”

John sighs as he reaches for a glass of whiskey on a nearby table, and heat rushes from Elton’s chest up to his head, changing coke bliss to coke rage.

“First person plural pronoun, dear.” John’s smile is sharp, and it barely falters as Elton rips the glass from his hand and hurls it toward the wall, sending liquid and crystal scattering across the carpet. The secretary yelps, but John’s attention finally belongs fully to Elton. John’s hand around Elton’s wrist is a vise, pressing the bracelet into Elton’s skin, and Elton, as always, clings to the pain, the proof that he still can command something from John. Behind him he hears Bernie speak, sharply, to John’s boy, their voices drifting back out the door. “Some water, I think.”

“Some respect, I think,” Elton retorts, a whine and not his most fetching one at that, but John does not look away, does not stop smiling, and Elton’s heart is pounding in his ears. “Please.”

“Did it disappear?”

John’s lips move closer to Elton’s the longer they stand there, trapped together in amber with the ruins of John’s whiskey around them, John’s hot fingers sliding pearls around Elton’s pulse. Elton leans away from his kiss, digging the tips of his own fingers into John’s chin until John halts.

“You know you’re being paranoid, right?”

“It’s been two weeks.” Elton bites the edge of John’s ear, smiling as John growls. “Two fucking weeks!”

“And?” John is out of breath now, his accent slipping further north as Elton pulls on his earlobe. “Has it been excellent since then?”

“I thought so.”

“Nothing’s changed, Elton.”

“Wouldn’t that be the fucking problem?” Elton’s voice gets louder the longer he makes his sentences, and John’s gravelly shushing noises only fuel him further. “Really not asking for much, here.”

“Oh, no, you only want me chained to your side, apparently.” John’s steadily building fury turns his complexion blotchy, heats his cheeks and eyes, and Elton, his muscles tensing in case he needs to duck, fights back a familiar incongruent arousal. John’s voice cracks as he releases Elton’s wrist, stepping out of Elton’s hold, his shoulders sagging. “Do you really think some empty-headed office boy holds a candle to you? That a snooker game _means_ a damn thing?”

“I don’t know; that’s the problem!” Elton’s hoarse, and through his numbness he can feel the water pooling in his eyes. “I don’t know how you can love me and let your dick wander halfway around the world—” he shakes his head, violently, ignoring John’s attempted interruption “—or be different from any other person I see nowadays, some desperate—some groupie!”

John laughs, sharp and angry, and yet with a flash of fierce fondness across his face that squeezes Elton’s heart. He’s struck anew by John’s beauty, chiseled from Scottish mountains and yet so animatedly warm when he’s moved just so, when it’s _Elton_ stirring him to such emotion.

“Am I really, Elton?”

It’s more sad than anything else, and Elton doesn’t have an answer, because of course John’s not his groupie, and yet each year Elton only accumulates more and more friends, more people who love him and want him and forget him as soon as he steps away for half a breath, and it’s frighteningly easy to lose John and even Bernie in that crowd. He leaves the room rather than reply, disappears into a breathless circle of people singing carols around the turntable and remains there, drinking wassail and playing DJ, his heart spinning alongside the vinyl, long after the house empties out and his high dies.

Elton comes back to himself, sprawled along the sitting room carpet listening to _Merry Christmas from Motown_ , when John takes a seat next to him, close enough for his body heat to raise the hair on Elton’s arms.

“All right?”

John, not the dim memory Elton has of Bernie asking him the same damned thing however many hours ago that was, and something in his tentative voice makes Elton want to cry. What, he wonders vaguely, eyes blurring as he attempts to focus on the whirling Tamla Motown logo, would happen if one day he said no?

The idea that it’s actually not all right, thank you very much, is an obscene one to have in a year where he released two albums, accepted nearly endless praise from everyone he spoke to or looked at, raked in garish amounts of cash; it’s an insult to his mansion and to the beautiful, infuriating man watching over him, taking care of their utterly charmed life. 

Elton removes his glasses to rub his eyes, stretching like a cat, the heat of John’s stare pooling itchily in his cock. John’s kiss tastes like wassail, booze and spices, his tongue firm inside Elton’s mouth.

“Bad comedown,” Elton murmurs when they part to breathe. His smile feels watery on his lips. “Maudlin.”

“My Elton, _sentimental_?” John is so mockingly fond that it only makes Elton’s eyes wetter, though his voice still rings with the brightness of cocaine. “Surely not.” His hand slides easily down the front of Elton’s trousers, curling inside his pants, and Elton is exhausted but his coke-addled cock is not. John’s eyes crinkle as Elton swells within his grasp, and his lips are hot, his breath ragged and eager, against the pearl in Elton’s ear. “Here, darling—” he cups Elton’s balls, while Elton, furious at himself for God knows what at this point, swallows down a sob “—you won’t have to do a thing.”

They haven’t fucked on the floor in months, and Elton is so slow, wrapped in alcohol, that he supposes this hardly counts as a fuck. John’s mouth is hot and tight around his cock, sucking Elton to full hardness, and by the time John, stripped naked and gleaming with sweat, lubricated with his own saliva and opened up with his own frantic fingers, settles down onto Elton’s cock, Elton has enough presence of mind to wrap his hands around John’s waist and thrust. John’s spacey moans echo off the high ceiling, and his face is a harsh facsimile of the black dog curled around Elton’s heart. With a burst of energy, Elton flips them, forcing John into the floor, tenderness transmuted into determination as John laughs.

“Hard,” he whispers, pulling off Elton’s cock and rolling onto his stomach. His arse is blindingly white, and he angles it back directly into Elton’s pelvis. “If you’re going to do this, you’d better mean it.”

Elton has no words, nothing to say while he gruffly fucks John to completion. John’s arse clenches suffocatingly around his cock, and Elton focuses on the sway of his necklace, smacking into John’s back like a metronome as John wanks himself, their combined thrusts slowly synching to it. He drifts bit by bit into the sour heat of his thoughts, where annoyance curdles into bile. When he finally comes, in short bursts hardly more than a stutter, he can feel his bitterness spill into John, lingering in John’s rough groans until he, too, finishes.

They lie in a heap on the carpet, Elton’s knees aching with what will be full rugburn by daylight, John’s hair itching where it brushes Elton’s skin. Elton closes his eyes and counts, silently; it takes until three hundred for the tension to dissipate, and he loses count after three hundred fifty, when John pushes his forehead against Elton’s and holds him gently around the neck.

“I _love_ you.”

Fervent, insistent, and uncertain, as John so rarely is; even when he’s been caught yet again with some pointless boy, he never falters like this, leaves the insecurity, the soul-deep desperation, to Elton. Elton keeps silent, smiling grimly while John’s trembling hands trace the necklace down to Elton’s half-clothed chest. He does not speak until they’ve fallen back into bed, the jewelry put away, the two of them hidden together under sheets that are soft against their naked, cooling skin.

“I’ll keep you.” He wraps John up in his arms, nipping at the base of John’s skull as John laughs. He tightens his grip around John’s chest until he can feel the dull thud of John’s heartbeat, steady under Elton’s hands, and breathe in the scent of sweat and whiskey, sharp and soothing. “You’re mine.”

It’s not a question, and yet his miserable throat, worn out from days of gigs and all of today’s emotional antics, makes it one. John responds immediately, turning to kiss him, heavy and lingering, the soft and grounding bludgeoning of the senses he often uses to draw Elton back to himself after a show. When it ends, Elton’s flat on his back, John curled along his side, soft cock digging into Elton’s hip, one arm across Elton’s chest.

“I, John Reid, do take thee, Reginald Kenneth Dwight.” There is no hint of question in his voice, no more insecurity, barely any touch of camp. The sincerity makes Elton, drunk and bare, shiver. “Elton Hercules John. I’m yours.” His smile is tight while he traces ghost pearls into Elton’s bare wrist; Elton, repressing a shudder, closes his eyes. “And you’re mine.”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos and all the rest very welcome if you're so moved, and if you want Rocketman and/or Elton and the occasional 70s rock reblog mixed among your feed, I'm also on [tumblr.](http://theoldgods.tumblr.com)


End file.
